Stylish, erotic and complex, Gilles Mimouni's only film to date appears at first sight to be quintessentially French, but has links to American identity-themed, noirish thrillers, such as Preminger's Laura and Hitchcock's Vertigo. (I'm also not so sure as other postings that all the locations and interiors are actually Parisian; the credits indicate that a lot of the movie was made in Spain.)
Max (Vincent Cassel) is a successful, young executive, engaged to be married, who catches a fleeting glimpse of an ex-lover, Lisa (Monica Bellucci), and immediately drops plans to travel to Tokyo, in order to find her. But, instead, he finds another woman (Romane Bohringer), bearing a resemblance to Lisa, with whom he starts an affair, while still hoping to find Lisa.
The story is told in an extremely fragmented manner, jumping backwards and forwards in time, with hair-style, clothing and sometimes weather providing clues to the sequence of events. By the end of the film almost every i has been dotted, and t crossed, so that theoretically it should be possible to re-edit the movie so that it is linear. But as well as being a duller movie, this would lose what I see as one of its main themes - that memories, fuelled by imagination, can be more powerful than mundane reality. Another theme seems to be that not everybody gets what they deserve, and life can be cruel. Generally, I see the film as being bleaker and more amoral than do some IMDb postings.
The acting, camerawork, sets, music and, of course, the editing are all first rate. This is a perfect film to rent, so that baffling bits (or all) of it can be replayed.
